Fujitsu LifeBook P8020

Introduction

The Fujitsu LifeBook P8020 is a very light laptop (at about 1.3 Kg) with a good, bright 12“ display in 1280×800 and a good full-size keyboard. It has a touchpad with two buttons (unfortunately, the place for the third button is taken by the oh-so-useful fingerprint sensor…) and scrolling areas for vertical and horizontal scrolling to the right and at the bottom of the touchpad area. It has a 8700 mAh (!) battery that lasts several (> 5, I haven't tested longer) hours.

It has all network and bus options I can think of (Wifi, wired Ethernet, Bluetooth, HSDPA/3G, USB, Firewire, Modem), an optical drive, an SD-card reader, a Cardbus slot, a VGA output and sound in/out.

Summary

You can enter a summary of how well the Fujitsu LifeBook P8020 works with Linux here.

Debian Lenny:

Most important parts work out of the box. There are some issues with:
* sound: quite weak signal from headphone output and the built-in speakers are also exceptionally quiet
* video: works fine in general, but fails to honour display brightness change with intel driver 2:2.3.2-2+lenny6. It is said to work better with fresher intel drivers. (FIXED in Debian Squeeze w/ 2:2.9.1-2)
* video again: there is a problem when switching from X to a virtual control resulting in flickering text; switching back and forth once is enough to solve the problem until reboot. (FIXED in Debian Squeeze w/ 2:2.9.1-2)
* fans: I like my working machine really quiet, and most Fujitsu laptops I tried can be made totally silent (when not loaded) by setting aggressive power management policies. However, it seems that the P8020 has problems cooling its hard drive (I have a spinning plate drive, not the SSD version). Turning off a CPU core and most other non-essential hardware parts had no substantial effect. Don't worry though, we're still talking about a really quiet fan here.